A health ministry source told the BBC that 19 of the children and women who survived needed treatment for burns and smoke inhalation.

Relatives of those affected gathered outside the hospital on Wednesday morning. They included Shaimaa Hassan, 36, who lost her two-day-old son.

“I waited for ages to have this baby and when I finally had him, it took only a second to lose him,” she told the Associated Press.

Ms Hassan and her husband were visiting the hospital when the fire erupted.

Image copyrightREUTERSImage captionRelatives of those affected gathered outside the hospital on Wednesday morning

“People started screaming ‘fire, fire’ and running,” she added.

The couple went towards the room where their son was being treated but were stopped by a wall of thick smoke.

“Then someone broke a window and threw me out,” Ms Hassan said.

Hussein Omar, 30, said he feared that his week-old twins had died.

Hospital officials had told him to look for them at the other hospitals in Baghdad, he told AP. But he could not find them and was then told to go to the hospital mortuary.

Image copyrightREUTERSImage captionMany of the relatives said they held the government responsible for the tragedy

“I only found charred pieces of flesh,” Mr Omar said. “I want my baby boy and girl back. The government must give them back to me.”

Eshrak Ahmed Jaasar, 41, who was unable to find her four-day-old nephew, blamed the government for the tragedy.

“We pay the hospital employees thousands of Iraqi dinars to allow us in to get our loved ones basic food and milk, which they cannot provide,” she said. “It’s a corrupt government that doesn’t care about its citizens and lets this happen.”

An official from the Baghdad health directorate, Jassem Lateef al-Hijami, was quoted by the AFP news agency as saying: “The hospital is very old and doesn’t have fire equipment.”

Photos purportedly taken inside the Yarmouk Hospital showed cockroaches crawling out from between broken tiles, bins overflowing with rubbish, dirty toilets, and patients lying on stretchers in a courtyard, the Reuters news agency reports.

7 thoughts on “Hospital fire kills 12 premature babies in Iraq”

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